Alternative & crisis is a week long events in response to current capitalistic crisis – I think some economies are not in any crisis. This will be followed by an exhibition curated by Oliver Ressler & Gregory Sholette that, according to the English blurb: “…today artists normally avoid to work on the question of the
crisis and capitalism in the world, this exhibition makes an
exception. It shows international artists of all generations that
confront problems of representation of capital, crisis and
resistance. Their works are driven by the urgent need to respond
to the crisis we are witnessing.”
I have not seen the exhibition, so response is re texts about it.
Are they saying that all these mainly direct and fairly “art oriented” efforts do not exist in relation to the “crisis”?
If indeed the capitalist crisis is of short term speculative acts that discount the possibility of futures, the future of our current unknowns and the pretence of knowing it while having a celebrated carelessness to promote and fetishise the Now/present/today – then why the utilitarian/useful-value-based approach with a sort of advert like focus on Urgency of action, that in my mind echoes precisely the acts of culture we want to overcome?
Am really asking these questions – not being sarcastic at all. While I am very sure that capitalism and its associated imaginations and culture takes us exactly to areas of brutality, power, death, over-distraction, inhumane relationships, total exploitation, anti-equalitisation, anti-democratisation and other authoritarian and fascistic processes – it seems to me that an approach that imagines people as binaries of un/useful mechanical devices, eg Thomas the tank engine Is good because its Useful, is exactly how to illustrate wanting to get a certain result while doing, and imagining exactly the opposite..
Hopefully, am exaggerating, or even better, a bit wrong..